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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#401

Post by __blockcipher__ »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #395
hyperion2010 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone at Elastic didn't do the math on this. Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to. Now that the gorilla has been enraged woe to the thing that pissed it off. We'll see if amazon actually contributes to the new fork. The fact that amazon is in a better position to make money off of open source software is part of the calculation that startups should be making if they are wr…

> Now that the gorilla has been enraged woe to the thing that pissed it off. We'll see if amazon actually contributes to the new fork. Elastic loses nothing by pissing off AWS, this was clearly the right move. AWS has contributed very little to the project so far, so if they took their toys home in a huff it makes no difference to Elastic. And if AWS does contribute significant development to their new fork, Elastic…

Just curious, have you ever operated Elasticsearch at scale? I haven't operated at the petabyte level but I have at the terabyte level, and everything I've seen tells me that this move is going to hurt Elastic immensely. They've forced Amazon to create the Elastic equivalent of postgressql/mariadb/jenkins ci.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#402

Post by 2bitencryption »

mylons wrote: post #267
paxys wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible for there to be no good guys in a fight. They are both multi-billion dollar corporations looking out for their shareholders' interests. "Open source" is being thrown around by both sides as a marketing/goodwill tool, nothing more.

this is the correct take. AWS and Elastic are both acting out of self interest with varying levels of gains for the customer in each.

I'm about to make a really petty and possibly off topic comment, so sorry for this --

"this is the correct take" is like my least-favorite Twitter-ism of them all. it's so ridiculously authoritative and final. Like, "Whoa, okay, everyone stop the discussion. @SandwichGuy87 has identified the correct take. Thanks for bringing us to reality, @SandwichGuy87."

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#403

Post by dodobirdlord »

sjwright wrote: post #330
that_guy_iain wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elastic say they want to make money of the product they've spent money developing and literally point at the company who basically announced they were using it in partnership with them and turns out isn't and isn't paying their fair share - AWS. AWS say they want elasticsearch and kibana to be open source. What they really mean is they want to use elasticsearch without paying their fair share.

What is the "fair share" payment for ElasticSearch under its Apache license? I'm not a lawyer but it appears to be $0. Meanwhile, how come everyone showing sympathy for Elastic's position doesn't seem to be showing equal sympathy for Apache Lucene? Surely Lucene is deserving of at least as much credit as Elastic.

If I recall correctly, the creator, chief maintainers, and primary contributors to Lucene are also at Elastic. The ElasticSearch/Lucene distinction is one primarily brought up by AWS advocates to muddy the waters.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#405

Post by bsimpson »

toast0 wrote: post #398
jlawer wrote: post #144

I really wish AWS would rename their fork. Call it something else, and just call it compatible with Elasticsearch v(FORKED_VERSION). Their continued trying to associate it to ES is causing most of the issues, and after this situation I don't think the name is a valuable as it used to be. AWS have the resources to do a nice clean re-branding as well. I am actually quite surprised they haven't just hired a small team o…

They could just call it Elastic Search? Because they have Elastic Compute and Elastic Load Balancers and I'm sure some more elastic bits, so Elastic Noun fits in their stable.

I don't work with AWS, but their products are so popular that I recognize many of them from conversations. I genuinely thought Elastic Search was an AWS offering until I saw this page.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#406

Post by __blockcipher__ »

fastball wrote: post #296
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally, these people do not believe in the core principles of capitalism, such as the notion that free trade makes both parties richer and that profit is not an evil but a necessary and healthy phenomenon. Thus because Amazon is a huge company, they view it making profit as fundamentally evil. They've also basically been brainwashed to think that the word "monopoly" means "any time a large company competes in…

> profit is not an evil but a necessary and healthy phenomenon I'm actually going to disagree slightly here. Making profit is not necessarily healthy, generating value and capturing a fraction of that value as profit is though. Our system is complex enough at this point where you definitely can and do have entities that are capturing more value than they are delivering, and that is immoral (imo). In that light, profi…

There's nothing unethical about "capturing more value than you deliver" (well, assuming I understand you right; I'm interpreting that to mean side A gets say +10EV and side B gets +100EV). In free trade, both sides benefit; that's why they freely chose to trade with each other. It is a myth that one side can unilaterally benefit at the expense of the other side. So if you actually meant "it's unethical if the consumer is coming out of the transaction worse than they came into it", that can't happen under a system of free enterprise. (To the extent that you think it's happening, you are making a value judgement that a certain side is irrational or stupid to perceive a trade to be valuable)

Now, there are absolutely cases where there is unethical profit, but (under my worldview, at least) those are all cases where the state gives a company a special advantage, or literally gives it money. So, the following is unethical:

- bailouts of corporations ("corporate welfare")

- government providing an exclusive monopoly to a given company

- government de-facto forcing someone to buy a product due to coercion

The following is not unethical:

- making a product, offering it freely for whatever price people are willing to pay

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#408

Post by danShumway »

bigiain wrote: post #386
caconym_ wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Don't know if I'd say that's the point , either, but it's definitely a lot closer to the essential spirit of the whole thing.

The essential spirit of "open source" or of "free as in freedom software"? Because I don't think those two align as closely as many of the arguments here gloss over...

I don't know what distinction other people make, but when I capitalize Open Source, I'm referring to Libre software, specifically of the kind that Stalman or the OSI would talk about.

Lower case open source is a term that I personally try not to use, specifically because of that confusion. I personally try to refer to that as source available or shared source when possible.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#409

Post by ryukafalz »

kodah wrote: post #384
markphip wrote: post #27

I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that. AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been…

I don't really get how people get this twisted. ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to th…

>What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end.

Gaps in open source licensing? The license Elastic chose explicitly allows anyone to take the code, run it as they wish, and not contribute anything back. There are other FOSS licenses that are slightly more strict about this; they could have chosen AGPL if they wanted someone hosting a service to publish their changes, for example. And then they could have used a proprietary license from the start if they didn't want others competing with them at all using their code.

Launching a competing offering using FOSS that someone else wrote is nothing new at all though. Red Hat built their business around subscriptions for and support of free software, much of which they wrote, but they hardly had exclusivity over the distribution (see CentOS and all the providers offering it) or the software they wrote. (It's all free software after all!)

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#410

Post by dodobirdlord »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #401
dodobirdlord wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now that the gorilla has been enraged woe to the thing that pissed it off. We'll see if amazon actually contributes to the new fork. Elastic loses nothing by pissing off AWS, this was clearly the right move. AWS has contributed very little to the project so far, so if they took their toys home in a huff it makes no difference to Elastic. And if AWS does contribute significant development to their new fork, Elastic…

Just curious, have you ever operated Elasticsearch at scale? I haven't operated at the petabyte level but I have at the terabyte level, and everything I've seen tells me that this move is going to hurt Elastic immensely. They've forced Amazon to create the Elastic equivalent of postgressql/mariadb/jenkins ci.

What downside exists for Elastic from making this change? If AWS makes valuable contributions on their fork, Elastic will absorb them, but the converse is no longer true. If the downside is that the AWS hosted ElasticSearch service will become successful, well, that was happening anyway before the relicensing.
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